Archive for October, 2009

Seeing Luc’s recent blog post where he explains how to add a vCenter License using PowerCLI, I thought I would stick with the licensing theme and show you how to export your vSphere License keys and details to a csv file enabling you to keep them backed up in a safe place.

This script will only work with vSphere as in vSphere the license server was removed and licensing became a great deal easier, if you want the v3 version you can grab it from my previous post here.

The output can be seen below:

Script:

$filename = “C:\LicenseInformation.csv“
If ((Get-View ServiceInstance).Content.About.Version-ge “4.0.0“){
$ServiceInstance = Get-View ServiceInstance
$LicenseMan = Get-View $ServiceInstance.Content.LicenseManager
$vSphereLicInfo = @()
Foreach ($License in $LicenseMan.Licenses){
$Details = “” |Select Name, Key, Total, Used,Information
$Details.Name= $License.Name
$Details.Key= $License.LicenseKey
$Details.Total= $License.Total
$Details.Used= $License.Used
$Details.Information= $License.Labels |Select -expand Value
$vSphereLicInfo += $Details
}
$vSphereLicInfo |Select Name, Key, Total, Used,Information |Export-Csv -NoTypeInformation $filename
}
Else {
Write “Sorry V4 Only“
}

I have included this in my new VESI PowerPack, the version in the PowerPack will automatically work out if your VI is V3 or V4 and show the appropriate information.

I was asked in my Script List if it was possible to change Multiple VMs to attach to a new PortGroup, this task is easy enough so long as you remember that every VM can have up to 4 virtual nics in VI3 and up to 10 in vSphere.

So to change all virtual machines we would do the following:

$OldNetwork = "PG1 192.168.0"
$NewNetwork = "PG2 10.1.1"

Get-VM |Get-NetworkAdapter |Where {$_.NetworkName -eq $OldNetwork } |Set-NetworkAdapter -NetworkName $NewNetwork -Confirm:$false

Or to change all of the VMs for a particular cluster we could use:

$Cluster = "Non-Production"
$OldNetwork = "PG1 192.168.0"
$NewNetwork = "PG2 10.1.1"

Get-Cluster $Cluster |Get-VM |Get-NetworkAdapter |Where {$_.NetworkName -eq $OldNetwork } |Set-NetworkAdapter -NetworkName $NewNetwork -Confirm:$false

Note: By default the Set-NetworkAdapter cmdlet would prompt you for each change it was going to make, this is overwritten by using the –Confirm:$false parameter.

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Whilst on a recent engagement with a customer we were looking at best practices and trying to quickly see how each PortGroup was configured, did all hosts have the same nics assigned to the same vSwitches, were all Portgroups setup the same to use the correct active and standby adapters ?

Have you ever tried doing this from the GUI ? Believe me it will take about 10 minutes to manually copy the relevant information from each host and if you have multiple PortGroups and multiple vSwitches then you can see how long this will take to check against best practice !

I think you know what is coming….

This came up again when someone asked me how to achieve exactly the same thing so I bumped it up my list of scripts I need to write.

Check out the below PowerCLI script, it lists all the needed information to perform this best practice analysis as you can see from the example output:

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